[Wikipedia-l] Harassment on wikipedia

Mon Jul 3 10:33:07 UTC 2006

After weeks and weeks of debate on this topic, and complaints to 
parties to "do something", I have decided to "do something".

... Drastic.

1. I declare that I am the new wikipedia overlord, super-administrator, 
and god-king. If, oh, the "community" or that "jimbo" guy wishes to 
appeal anything to me, it must be accompanied by a sufficient grovel. 
Oh, and animal/vegetable/mineral sacrifice of some kind might help, 
along with 20 questions about why they should be listened to.

2. I declare that since wikipedia is primarily a textual medium, and 
not a spoken medium, I hereby declare that what defines a wikipedia 
"language" will be documentation of textual expression, of a spkoken 
language, in a specific character set, by 1000 people or more, at any 
given point in time. Thus, the myriad of chinese languages, which use 
multiple character sets, will be available with those characters. 
Likewise, since romanian languages have been historically documented as 
using cyrillic character sets by more than 1000 people, they will also 
be available.

3. I declare that in conjunction with the above, patent nonsense and 
straw-men, like using a klingon character set for writing articles in 
ancient hebrew, is straight out, as there is no verifiability that 1000 
ancient hebrews wrote in klingon character sets.

4. I also declare that wikipedia has no stake in debates as trivial and 
annoying as "you put jelly in my peanut butter!" or "you put peanut 
butter in my jelly!" or "you put cyrillic in my romanian!". Wikipedia 
is not the appropriate place to express whether or not a certain 
condiment *should* have been used, or that a certain character set 
*should* have been used. If a character set has been widely used, we 
should make such a language and character set combination available.

5. If people are offended that their language, and how it has been 
written, over time, are offended, that they build time machines to fix 
the problem. Wikipedia does not censor the past, wikipedia documents 
the past. If folks are offended that their language was written in 
another character set, I suggest that those who are offended travel to 
the past to ensure that such a thing never happened.

6. I hope that you, my faithful subjects, will abide by my decrees, or 
I will put jelly in your peanut butter.

Signed by your new overlord, super-administrator, and god-king:
-Ronabop, New God-king of wikipedia